http://www.pudel.uni-bremen.de/pdf/Iv_tra_b.pdf

The Pudel site, in Bremen, which is chock full of his papers and those of others:
http://www.pudel.uni-bremen.de/100en_startseite.htm

And Altruists International, where you can grab MP3 recordings of that Canadian radio program from 2000, “The Corruption of Christianity.”

http://www.altruists.org/

(just run a search for Illich and you’ll be shown a page full of text and audio files)

One last thing: the reverse is true of your warning about dry scholasticism: the mystical without the scholastic discipline risks degenerating into hysteria or presumption or both, which happens often enough, both in the early modern period and even today.

Thanks for weighing in on the discussion.

Your point about Anselm is well-taken, but for me, it’s a perfect example of the right dynamic at work. You see, the apparent irreconciliability of compassion and impassibility is precisely an analytic problem, one that requires the best kind of scholastic reasoning to handle. To refuse scholastic reasoning in the name of poetic insight is to punt on a fundamental question, which is “Who is the King of Glory?” (Ps. 24) More fundamentally, it’s to separate the Good and the Beautiful from the True.

BTW, When you tackle that analytic problem, you can discover that impassibility, rightly understood, is the condition for the possibility of God’s abundant compassion to all (or more precisely, to each). Best book on this is Thomas Weinandy, OFM Cap, Does God Suffer? for the Latin tradition, and Paul Gavrilyuk, The Suffering of the Impassible God for the Greek Patristic tradition. It looks like the poets and theologians have had quite a lot to say to each other.

Which gets me back to my point about ressourcement… It just may be that we project our modern binary oppositions back onto a tradition that knew them not.

Having said that, I believe the tension between the mystical and the analytic is present right at the foundations of Scholasticism. For example, St. Anselm the poet has but one topic, the compassion of God. But Anselm the theologian argues that God, being impassable, cannot possibly be compassionate! It is unfortunate that the theologian and the poet could not sit down and talk out their differences. St. Bonaventure grasps this tension as well as anyone. But by the 17th century, all these distinctions are lost, and Thomas becomes a precursor of Enlightenment “objectivity” (which is the way he is still perceived by many Thomists) especially in Descartes and (surprisingly) Spinoza.

Thanks once again for your thoughtful response.

The problem with an account of the separation of scholastic and mystical schools of theology is that these don’t properly exist. Who is Bonaventure? Mystic or scholastic? Who is Nicholas of Cusa? Is Thomas Aquinas a mystic? Is Meister Eckhart not a scholastic? Something happens in early modern theology, to be sure… hard to find a mystical whiff in Suarez…, but what I’m suggesting (and this isn’t quite fair, because I’m writing a book on this very topic now, and so I’m prone to blather on… forgive me) is that there is a basic shift, one that Illich helps me to find, actually, into thinking of theological reasoning instrumentally. Scholastic reasoning becomes a technology, and a technology that can further the institutional distribution of authorized truth-bits (hence the manual theology tradition) So it’s most deeply an epistemological shift before it’s an ecclesial one. There’s a great piece in the journal Modern Theology from 2005, in a special issue on Duns Scotus, by Emmanuel Perrier, OP that gives a very suggestive reading of the whys and wherefores of this shift. He suggests, in brief, theological overconfidence.

So here we find common cause… that when theology is alienated from the life and practice of faith hope and love it stifles. But it would be a mistake to take that analysis politically/sociologically, as the marginalization of mystical theology per se. Rather it would be better understood as (to my reckoning) bad theology vs. good. You can still find good theology (good doctrine, I dare say) in Teresa of Avila. Teresa, I’ll go out on a limb to say, understands the doctrine of creation, with all it implies for the relationship between Creator and creatures, better than Suarez or his descendants. But it’s also true that you can find that same good theology in well-trained scholastics (and institutional heavies) like Cardinal Archbishop Nicholas of Cusa.

Going backward, Origen’s commentary on the Song of Songs is marked not by the “tension” between the mystical and the dogmatic but by the seamless movement between them. To understand difference as tension is already to make an interpretive judgment. But for Origen, it’s as seamless as the movement from literal to moral to figural and mystical senses of Scripture… To say there’s a tension between these to Origen would be like saying there’s enmity between honey and its sweetness.

So you look to Schelling, and you know that stuff better than I do. I find a *ressourcement* back to the patristic and medieval sources more hopeful. But that may just be my ignorance.

Now I need a (second) cup of coffee!

“But I disagree that sacramentality is the problem.”
I agree with this statement, I don’t think sacramentality is the problem but the result of the “problem” that arose when early Christians discerned/understood that eschatologically speaking the ‘end’ was not going to be in the immediate. The movement toward ‘sacramentality’ is, I think, a rather normal reaction to the above insight and also an attempt-a successful one at that- to provide for the possibility of capturing the pneumatic reality revealed in the Gospel.

As an aside: the Gospel is presented to “the poor in spirit,” does that mean to those with ‘inquiring minds?’ If so the Gospel is for Man the Questioner, man in his natural/normal condition of seeking and questing while his life is existence in the Platonic metaxy, existentially experienced in consciousness (intentionality and mystery, with the key being ‘mystery’) in movement between the poles of immanence and transcendence.

“The problem you’re articulating, the division between mystical and scholastic theology, etc., is symptom rather than cause, and it tends to reinforce all sorts of binary oppostions that are part of the logic of modernity that stands in need of healing.”
(My question: What is the cause?) In the meantime, I understand the ‘great modern spiritual crisis’ is predicated on the separation of these schools of theology and a rejection or shunting aside of the mystical/experiential school of theology. I am speaking in the most general terms here. I’m not intimately aware of the cutting edge thinking, or the new materials related to this problem but merely observing anecdotally what I observe in my very small corner of the world and a few essays read over the years.

“If one starts with that reading of history, then modern liberalism is the inevitable outcome, and we’re right back where we started from. In fact, your claim about the “reality of the Logos existentially realized in the freedom of the Spirit” sounds more like Hegel than John of the Cross. The latter you can read in catechism class, to great effect. The former, less helpful.”
Actually, I’m reading several rather brilliant critiques of FW Schelling who may be the ‘real’ father of existentialism and who straightened out certain elements of Hegel’s derailment! My fascination with the German Idealists is in the acknowledgement of their underlying desire to prioritize existence (which includes spirit) in terms of the modern question of science and rights, gleaned from Dr. David Walsh’s (CUA)remarkable book, “The Modern Philosophical Revolution.” Schelling, Walsh tells his readers, was a brilliant philosopher and a devout Christian which if we believe Justin the Martyr is quite logical in that Christianity represents the perfection of philosophy. I think that one may ‘come to Jesus’ via philosophy, but it depends on what Fr. Spearmann(sp)calls “the heart,” and that can be a tricky thing.

“Doctrine is nothing other than the spiritual discipline of naming God, which is a part of the mystical tradition since before the sixth century, when Denys the Areopagite wrote the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology as companion pieces (and threw in the Celestial and Ecclesiastical Hierarchy for good measure)”
I’d like to discus your definition of ‘doctrine,’ but perhaps some other time. Rather a comment on ‘mysticism’ from Carmel Bendon Davis’s book, “Mysticism and Space”, where she explicates mysticism (from the early Middle Ages to the 16th century) from pseudo-Denis’s “Theologia Mystica” as ‘the secret knowledge of God’ which presents all number of obvious problems for the church, including the monster in the closet, gnosticism, which may be the root cause for the turning away from mystical theology. Is that the case?
I have not read Origen but I understand that his work is ‘dominated’ by the ‘tension between theologia mystica and theologia dogmatica.’ Does the separation of schools of doctrine and mysticism occur during the time of Origen or later? Or, perhaps, I should say the dominance of doctrine!

“Without doctrine, who would recognize the Spirit, as opposed to any old Spirit of the Age?”
The history of man’s metaxical movement reveals not only the quest for the Unknown God but the numerous occasions in which revelatory consciousness became luminous. Christian doctrine was not a function of these revelatory events.

In total agreement with your final thoughts. I have no problem at all with ‘doctrine,’ man requires doctrine, but doctrine is not a constituent in the revelatory event where the love of God, freely given, is existentially experienced.
The question, for me: is the decline of the church in the face of modernity a function of the exclusion/suppression of theologia mystica from the body of Christ? My response to this decline is an emphasis/reaffirmation of the mystical/spiritual/revelatory experience in the face of modernity’s sundry psycho-pneumopathologies. A systematic effort on the part of the Christian church to teach that the reality of man’s existence in the metaxical reality spoken of earlier, where consciousness dwells in a tension between immanence and Spirit; where Spirit, rising in freedom, yearns for being in love.

Now I have a headache and need a cup of coffee!

Thanks for your comment. But I disagree that sacramentality is the problem. The problem you’re articulating, the division between mystical and scholastic theology, etc., is symptom rather than cause, and it tends to reinforce all sorts of binary oppostions that are part of the logic of modernity that stands in need of healing. Not Yet vs. Already, scholastic vs. mystic; doctrine vs. experience; freedom vs. catechism. I don’t think that’s as accurate a reading of the middle ages as we once thought… it’s a rather whig account of history that ends in the liberal individual set free from institutions and doctrines and scholastic structure.

If one starts with that reading of history, then modern liberalism is the inevitable outcome, and we’re right back where we started from. In fact, your claim about the “reality of the Logos existentially realized in the freedom of the Spirit” sounds more like Hegel than John of the Cross. The latter you can read in catechism class, to great effect. The former, less helpful.

Doctrine is nothing other than the spiritual discipline of naming God, which is a part of the mystical tradition since before the sixth century, when Denys the Areopagite wrote the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology as companion pieces (and threw in the Celestial and Ecclesiastical Hierarchy for good measure) Without doctrine, who would recognize the Spirit, as opposed to any old Spirit of the Age? Without institutions, we find it difficult to distinguish true freedom from presumption and license. Without the disciplines of scholasticism, we can find ourselves unprepared for the disciplines of silence and unknowing.

And we could just as easily turn these around: Without the Spirit, doctrine is simply letters on a page; etc., etc. But the point is that the logic of modernity tends to separate precisely that which cannot and should not be.

The power of the language of sacrament lies precisely in this… that it holds the most particular and material together with utter transcendence. We learn in sacrament that particular, material stuff is not only not an obstacle to knowing God but a very form of God’s presence in our midst.

The problem for Christianity has been in accepting that apocalypse is a future event in history, the church became sacralmentalized, while abandoning the reality in freedom of the Unknown God revealed in the mystical and experiential theology long overshadowed by school theology which reveals a dry, desiccated God in doctrine.

The reality of Logos is existentially realized in the freedom of Spirit, that instance revealing freedom itself, going beyond itself. Sadly, one can not experience this in Bible school or catechism class.

To put things in some perspective with the Front Porch Republic ethos in mind, I think the wisdom gained from Illich is that the desire to do simply everything we *can* do, and to do so through instrumental rationality — institutional forms and technology– can be a (very understandable but) devastating temptation, and it might be at the very root of our sense of modernity’s ills. It’s seductive precisely because there is a real good sought, so it sounds an awful lot like virtue. This, I think, is why Illich invokes the notion from Scripture of the “mystery of iniquity” (2 Thess 2.3)… it’s at work, but it can be hard to sniff out.

There’s a deep monitory word here about the need to discern limits, and I think for Illich it’s more art than science, a kind of sensibility cultivated through his “practices of gratuity.” So that’s the question we’re left with: How will we cultivate this sense in our lives, in a world(view) immune to grace?

Christianity before the reformation was generally by its nature hierarchic, and this probably predisposed it to institutionalization. Plus, if one does think that God’s will toward the church is made apparent in history (most basically in that it survive until the end of time), then one probably must conclude that becoming institutionalized is providential.

That said, it’s definitely a mixed blessing. Those who point to Constantine and see a fall have this position for some good reasons, even if I think they are wrong, and history indicates they are wrong as well. In the same vein, the severing of the connection between Christianity and government bore some positive fruit–Christianity should be about persons making a choice for certain beliefs and concordant actions, not about any form of worldly getting ahead– as well as the negative fruit of secularization and all its attendant ills.

I hesitated to write the bit about Constantinianism, since I know that this signals for some a particular kind of Mennonite account of the nature of the church, and this was not really Illich’s take. When I teach the history of the church, I often get to the point where, laying out all the needs and crises before your eyes, and having just recovered from the frontal assault on the faith under Diocletian, if you were a bishop, it would be awfully hard not to think that some form of establishment was a blessing. But a terrible blessing at that. And if some might prefer to lay the blame at the Gregorian Reform, there’s plenty of problems there, too, but the same question applies — would it be wise to do otherwise? It’s just important to remember that it’s as often our failures as our successes that God brings to the good in providence. Ilich had that perspective, I think, and it set him free to speak the truth as he saw it about the birth of modernity without, as I say, the cheap consolations of wholesale condemnation.

It also gave him the tools to maintain a kind of studied distance from modern perspectives and to learn the life of hospitality and gratuity. Limits and liberty….

Dr. Hughes, thanks for a great read. I appreciate Illich’s ambivalence toward the “institutionalization” of Christian faith. While recognizing the potential pitfalls in the path of Christian history, we might also ask how it could have developed otherwise–there are certainly other counterfactual scenarios we might envision, but these are often too facile. It is fashionable to pin the blame on the “Constantinian fall” in an overly simplistic way; so it is especially refreshing to learn that Illich recognized a certain irreducible complexity in the Church’s historical development.

Cheers.